At Last: A Sequel I Can Get Behind

It finally happened.

Yesterday, Netflix announced that El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie will air on the the streaming service on October 11.



Aaron Paul, who played Jesse Pinkman on the original show for five seasons and reprises his role for this sequel, summed up my feelings pretty well:

"It's a chapter of Breaking Bad that I didn't realize I wanted. And now that I have it, I’m so happy that it’s there."

I've long been funny about sequels and prequels and even second+ seasons of very good TV shows. Our entertainment industry has a long tradition of not knowing when the horse is dead, or they don't care if the horse is dead so long as there's a critical mass that will pay to see it (though their motivation could also be like that of Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom in The Producers). We end up with too many sequels or too many seasons of a tired TV show limping along, and we either forget what made it so good in the first place, or we just hope it will recapture some of the original magic, or we still somehow care about characters despite what second and third and fourth teams of writers/directors/creators turn them into.

But I have hope for this one. Not only because Breaking Bad creator, Vince Gilligan is really good at what he does, but also because the track record for television seems to be improving. After season two of The Good Place, I really didn't see how they could keep that premise rolling. They have. The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has rolled right on. Season two of The OA was very good. And my most anticipated (and feared) sequel season, HBO's Barry, somehow managed to equal--and even exceed, at times--an excellent first season.

So, on October 11 I think I'll plunk myself down in front of the TV and see what happened to Jesse Pinkman. I'll be rooting for him, too, hoping he can find a way to shed the horrors he endured through five seasons of Breaking Bad.

How are you all doing?

Breaking Bad Revisited

Back in early August, I found myself home alone for an extended weekend, due to a work requirement that coincided with a family event. Sunday afternoon found me too physically tired to mow the lawn or do much around the house, and too brain dead to write or read; I reached for the TV remote instead--and soon found myself rewatching Breaking Bad.

I know a lot of people will say, "Why rewatch some TV show when there's so much good, new programming out there?" Indeed, there are only so many hours in a day, week, month, life; why spend it watching something you've already seen, especially something that takes so much time? (Breaking Bad ran for five seasons, 62 episodes, roughly 50 minutes per episode. I hate doing math that shows how much time I've spent on something, just as I hated looking at the "Time Played" counter on my World of Warcraft characters.)  Yet I regularly seek out the comfort of previous experience when choosing my television, film and reading material. Earlier this year, I finished a re-read of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, and I'm currently re-reading It for seemingly the thousandth time. There's a good bet that, some time in the next year or so, I'll pick up either A Prayer for Owen Meany or Empire Falls again, too, even though  there are literally thousands of books I haven't read before coming out each year. Often, I'll just grab something familiar off the shelf when I'm in between new books, though sometimes I just get a real strong urge to read an old book once more (It came about in part because we watched last year's movie version, which was actually pretty good).

As a writer, there's great benefit in following those familiar paths. Watching the first few episodes of Breaking Bad, however, I found myself really viewing Walter's and Jesse's actions against the context of what those characters become as the series goes on. It's especially fascinating to see the breadcrumbs being dropped by the showrunners. One of the central questions of the show was who is the true Walter White? The mild-mannered, bumbling high school chemistry teacher, or the ruthless Heisenberg? I don't think I started asking that question until more than halfway through the series on my first run through; now, I've been looking for it since episode one, watching for clues, and I think "Walter White" may have been the mask worn by "Heisenberg" for fifty years. By the end of season two, which is where I am now, that certainly seems to be more than a slim chance.

Interestingly, I find I interact differently with books when I re-read them than I do with movies or TV. I suspect it has to do with the difference in impact images make on your brain than words, or that reading engages the mind in a different way. I will sometimes pick up something as foreshadowing, or the first appearance of a motif in the work, but for me, re-reading a book is much more like reading it for the first time than watching TV or a movie.

How about you? Do you experience TV, movies and books differently the second (or third) time around? Do  tell!B

The Awesome Spectacular

Remember back when I wrote about the impending series finale of Breaking Bad, and how I was afraid of the writers/producers giving in to the hype and screwing things up? No? You can read it here .

Anyway, this is on my mind because of the last two episodes of that fabled show from across the pond, Doctor Who.

Two momentous events happened in the last two months. First, right before Thanksgiving in America, the show celebrated its 50^th anniversary with an episode called, "The Day of the Doctor". A brief round of applause, please. Fifty years for a non-news program or talk show is insanely impressive (and we'll excuse the 16-year hiatus the show had between 1989 and 2005), and showrunner Stephen Moffat no doubt felt pressured into doing something big. Now, when the episode opened, I had immediate misgivings, as we quickly found ourselves in a long sequence that featured the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) hanging from the TARDIS as it was being dangled beneath a helicopter over London. "Oh, boy," I thought. "This is going to suck." It had the feel of BIG TELEVISION EVENT SPECTACULAR! which meant, in my mind, that it was likely to be big on spectacular special effects, guest appearances, and other Cool Stuff, but short on the stuff that makes for a good program: story.

There were indeed some spectacular effects (well, maybe not spectacular; this is Doctor Who, after all, which can be almost as cheesy as original Star Trek), great guest appearances, and other Cool Stuff, and the story was sufficiently big, if not always sensible (this is Doctor Who, after all), but in the end I was quite pleased with the effort. Matt Smith, David Tennant, and John Hurt had great rapport as three versions of the Doctor (and I had forgotten how much I like David Tennant); Billie Piper did a really nice job as The Moment--I'm glad they didn't decide to simply resurrect her as former companion Rose; and it was great how they found a way to pay homage to all the old Doctors. I do have a major quibble with what I feel is a whitewashing of the Doctor, in a way, but this is not the time or place for that. Again, the episode was enjoyable to watch.

And then there's the Christmas special. The Christmas special this year was notable for being the final episode for Matt Smith as The Eleventh Doctor, and the introduction of Peter Capaldi as Twelve. Did I enjoy it? Ye-e-s-s. But I also felt that the episode succumbed to the need to make it a BIG TELEVISION EVENT SPECTACULAR! In my mind it suffered seriously from Kitchensinkitis as Moffat threw in everything: Daleks! Cybermen! The crack in the wall from Amy's bedroom! Weeping Angels! The Silence! Time Lords from another dimension! ***spoiler alert***Amy!***end spoiler*** The problem was, most of these things were there and gone. They didn't feel like integral parts of the episode's narrative; rather, they felt like things that were thrown in to make the story feel more Epic. It was mostly enjoyable, but I feel that, in their efforts to make it memorable, they failed to deliver on the promise. It was too crowded with stuff.

Well, I suppose we've got a couple of years to think about a proper send-off for Peter Capaldi's Doctor. Maybe they'll be able to apply that old principle, "Less is more."

Did you watch either of the Doctor Who holiday spectaculars? What did you think?

And It's Over

Last night saw the final episode of Breaking Bad, a show I heard about for two, three years before I finally gave in and started watching it, a show that I found to be a complete, grab-you-by-the-throat experience. In its five season run, I don't think I ever found myself thinking, "Well, that episode was kind of lame." My attention didn't wander, I didn't feel like it got lost and started wandering aimlessly, it never really lost forward momentum--or, if it did, it was so well done that I didn't notice.

I approached the last few episodes with nervous excitement, and a sense of impending doom. That sense of doom was not so much for the characters and their potentially ugly fates, but for the show itself. Good endings are hard to get right, and when you know your show is serious water cooler fodder, and that millions of people will be tuning in and talking about it afterwards it's easy to choke. Executive Producer Vince Gilligan and his team of writers did not choke. They gave us an ending that was both fair and appropriate given the characters and where they were on their personal journeys at that point in time.

Fairness is an important part of getting it right. If there's one quibble I have with the ending ***MINOR SPOILER, but no major plot points*** it's that Walter perhaps got too much of what he wanted.***END SPOILER*** If I say that, however, it's because there was a part of me that was screaming out for justice, But justice and fairness are not the same thing, and I think 'fair' was better.

What say you? Did you watch Breaking Bad? Did you think the end was fair? PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, if you comment, remember that not everyone may have watched the ending yet, and tag your comment for potential spoilers. Thanks!

Fitting Ends

Every so often I see a blog post that dovetails nicely with something I've been thinking about. When it happens, I usually scrap whatever I was planning to blog about, if indeed I was planning anything. This week was one of those weeks.

On Tuesday, Jemi Fraser wrote about a disappointing experience with an author. Said author wrote a book that was working—things made sense, the story was good, she liked the characters, everything was working.

Until the last page.

What she ended up with was an ending that made no sense, an ending that undid all the work that the author had put in to that point, an ending that left Jemi quite disappointed. Everything she said clicked with something that I'd been musing on all weekend.

The something that started the musing in the first place was the news that the first half of season 5 of Breaking Bad had finally arrived on Netflix (just in time for AMC to begin the show's final installment of episodes, which started Sunday). I've been waiting for this for a while now, because I'm cheap and don't want to buy DVDs or pay premium rental fees. Anyway, starting Sunday I began watching season 5 and should be caught up pretty soon. (I'd be caught up already, but my wife, who has a hate/hate relationship with the show, can only watch one episode per night. It's probably better that way.).

I've written here about BB before, about how I think it's done a brilliant job of characterization and showing, not telling (yeah, it's a TV show, but it's still a great example of it). As the end draws closer, I've been wondering what kind of conclusion we can expect, and whether it will be a satisfying, fitting end to a great series, or if it will disappoint, like the book Jemi read.

Endings are hard to get right, and they are of critical importance. If your book ends poorly, it can ruin an otherwise-wonderful journey, as Jemi found. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending, but it has to be the right ending. There's always pressure to get it right, but new writers have a certain advantage: we write our books, especially our first ones, in a vacuum. We write with freedom, unencumbered by anything except our own desires to tell the best story we can. We hope for success, we hope for readership, but when a reader gets your book, the ending has already long-been written, and you're hopefully already elbows-deep in the next one.

The folks running Breaking Bad, however, have tougher conditions to deal with. Not only do they have to wrap up the series in a way that makes sense within the confines of the world they've built, they also have to satisfy a rabid fanbase, and put up with intense media scrutiny. Series finales (and this goes for books and movie franchises as well as TV shows) have become Major Events, hyped up to the nth degree by network PR departments in order to capture as many eyes—and advertising dollars—as possible. The normal, week-to-week show structure is frequently thrown out of whack by having a longer episode. Or turning it into a two-hour movie. Viewers are promised something big and extra special, and it's often hard for the writers to deliver. (Some have suggested that this is why it seems to be taking George R.R. Martin so long to deliver the final book—or is it two?—to his Song of Ice and Fire series; maybe there's truth to it, maybe not). Sometimes, the finale lives up to expectations (M*A*S*H); sometimes it falls flat (Seinfield). Sometimes, no one knows what to think (The Sopranos).

I've been wondering what kind of end we'll see for Walter White and the people in his world, and I have no idea what we're going to get (I have two episodes left in the first half of season five, so please don't spoil anything for me!). All I hope is that it's the right ending. It doesn't have to be big, it doesn't have to be spectacular, and it doesn't have to make me feel good (and indeed, it's really hard to see a 'feel good' ending coming out of this series). It just has to be right. I have some ideas in my head about what 'right' is for this show, though I'll keep them to myself for right now.

Have a great weekend, all.

Image by Dwros89, used under Creative Commons license.